Chapter 6: A Map of Possibilities

Chapter 6: Chapter 6: A Map of Possibilities

I

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 4 April 1896

Thirty kuru? was a fortune to a six-year-old, and almost nothing to the man he intended to become.

Ayaan Hassan carried the coins in a knotted rag for nine days before he found anything worth spending them on.

Hatice Han?m had told him to buy something that was his own. He had taken the instruction more seriously than she could have guessed.

The answer arrived on a bright Saturday morning, in the person of Yorgos, who came into the shop with his hat pushed back and a long paper tube under his arm.

"Mehmet Efendi, the Mahmudiye is loaded and the captain is in a good humor, which is a miracle in itself. I have also come to ask a favor of your son."

Ayaan, perched on his stool by the lentils, looked up with the blank courtesy of a child who has not been listening.

Yorgos unrolled the tube across the counter and weighted its corners with figs.

It was a chart, printed in France, creased into eighths and stained with a ring of old coffee. The Golden Horn curved across it, and the Bosphorus ran away to the north.

"The mate threw it out," Yorgos said. "The paper is good, but my master counts every sheet in the chandlery, so I cannot give it away. Ten kuru?."

"What does a boy want with a chart of the water?" said Mehmet, amused.

"To see where everything is," said Ayaan.

It was out before he could dress it up as something simpler. Mehmet looked at him for a moment, and then, to his surprise, nodded.

"A merchant who knows where everything is will not be the worst merchant," he said. "Pay the man."

Ayaan untied the rag with great ceremony and counted out ten kuru?.

Then he bent over the chart and forgot that anyone was watching him.

The city was there, but only as a pale smudge of streets, because the French cared about the water and not about the people on it. The harbor, though, was drawn with great care, with soundings in tiny numerals, quays named in careful French, and the Galata shore fringed with the little anchors that marked where ships could lie.

Emin-Eunu, said the label over his own quarter, and he nearly laughed.

He had seen this city from above many times in his old life, on a phone, in the cold blue light of a satellite. He had never once looked at it as a thing that could be worked.

That night, after the lamp was out, he pinned the chart above his cot with two bent nails.

Fatma came in to check the quilt, and her eyes went to the paper and rested there. She said nothing, but when she left she did not take the lamp, and the little flame stayed on the shelf until he slept.

II

Constantinople, Galata — 18 April 1896

"Money is not made in a shop," Mustafa Efendi announced, as the three of them crossed the long bridge over the Golden Horn. "Money is made in the street we are about to walk up."

Ahead of them, Galata climbed from the water in a tangle of stone and slate, with the old tower standing above it all.

Mustafa led them up a steep, crowded street that the Franks called the Street of the Banks. It was narrower than Ayaan remembered from the future, and louder, and it smelled of horse dung and cigars.

Moneychangers sat in doorways with trays of coin in front of them, gold liras and silver medjidies and French francs and Austrian thalers, all glittering together in the morning light.

"Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Levantines, a few Muslims who pretend they are not here," said Mustafa, with a grin. "Everyone in Constantinople who has lent a para to anyone else comes here sooner or later."

He took them into a narrow office above a coffee seller’s, where a stout man with a magnifying glass bent over a sheet of paper. The man did not look up.

"Monsieur Vitali, I have a bill," said Mustafa, and set a folded paper before him.

It was a bill of exchange, in French, on a Marseille house, for eight hundred francs payable in ninety days. He had drawn a hundred of them in his old life, on examination papers, with clean little boxes for drawer and drawee.

"A promise," said Mustafa, speaking over his shoulder, half to himself. "Written so that a stranger may trust it as if it were coin."

"But it is not coin," said Zeynep.

"No. It is coin in three months. If I want it today, Monsieur Vitali buys it from me for a little less, and he waits in my place."

"The little less is the price of waiting," said Ayaan.

He said it softly, almost to himself, and Mustafa’s head turned.

It was the warehouse again, the rent and the rats and the rot and the money asleep. Here it had been taken out into the street, given a stamp, and sold by the hour.

"Good," said Mustafa slowly. "That is exactly what it is."

Monsieur Vitali named a figure, and Mustafa grumbled.

The figure moved by a hair, and both men looked entirely satisfied.

Afterward, on the steps, Zeynep tugged at her father’s sleeve.

"How much does the bank take for waiting?"

"Eight or nine in the hundred, for a year. For a house the bank knows."

"And the man who came to Hatice Han?m’s door?"

Mustafa’s face changed. He glanced down the street, where a thin man in a dark coat stood outside a plain door with a brass plate.

"That one," he said quietly, "takes ten in the hundred for a month. And he takes it from people no bank will look at."

"But that is more than ten times as much," said Zeynep.

"Yes."

"Then the poor pay more."

"The poor have always paid for what the rich get free, little merchant." He said it without bitterness, as he might have said that it rained in autumn. "It is called being known."

Ayaan stood on the step with the noise of the street pouring over him.

He had thought of trust as a thing a man earned in a lane. Here it was priced, and the price was the difference between a bank and a stranger in an alley.

A man who is known pays a tenth, and a man who is not pays the whole world.

It was an information problem, he thought, and then, hard on its heels: it is a whole city of information problems, and every one of them is waiting for someone with a book.

He lifted his eyes, and the Ottoman Bank was in front of him.

It filled the upper end of the street, a stern pale palace of stone, only four years old, with tall windows and a doorway that made the clerks going in look like children.

Ayaan knew that building.

In the history he remembered, it had a date attached to it, in the dry numerals of a textbook footnote: the twenty-sixth of August, 1896.

He knew what was coming on that day, and how the city would answer it in the days after, and he knew it with the helpless clarity of a man reading the last page of a book he cannot reach into.

Four months.

He did not let himself finish the thought. He had no way to warn anyone, and no voice that would be believed, and no hands that could close a single door.

Zeynep’s fingers slid into his and tightened. She was looking at him, not at the bank, and her brows had drawn together.

"You have gone very white," she said.

"It is the noise."

"That is not what it is."

"I know," said Ayaan, and did not let go of her hand until they were back on the bridge.

III

Constantinople, Bab?ali Street — 2 May 1896

On the first Saturday of May, Mehmet took his son to deliver a sack of raisins to a printer.

It was a small errand, and he made it sound smaller. Ayaan understood within a hundred paces that his father had chosen it with care.

"You say you want to see where everything is," said Mehmet, as they climbed the hill behind the Sublime Porte. "Very well. Today you will see where the paper goes."

The shop of Nikolaki Efendi smelled of lamp oil and wet ink. A Frankish press squatted in the middle of the floor, fed by two apprentices in stained aprons.

Nikolaki was a heavy man with ink to the elbows and a broad, anxious face. He took the raisins from Mehmet and gave the sack a doubtful squeeze before he remembered his manners.

"Forgive me, Mehmet Efendi. It is only that nothing is coming in at the price it was."

"The paper?"

"The paper, the ink, the type, all of it, and it all comes from Trieste or Leipzig or Lyon." He flung out a hand toward a stack of reams along the wall, tied in brown wrappers and stamped with a foreign mark. "There is not a sheet in this shop that was made within five hundred leagues of this room."

Ayaan, standing as a child should with one finger in his mouth, studied the stack.

He read the marks on the wrappers and the prices scrawled on the corners, and then he asked himself who was getting rich.

It was not Nikolaki. It was the man in Trieste, and the shipper, and the broker at the quay who took a little off every bale as it passed.

An empire that could not make its own paper, he thought, was an empire in which every written word had a foreign tax on it.

"Why does it not come from here?" he asked, in his smallest voice.

Nikolaki laughed, and it turned into a cough. "Because there is a mill at Izmit that makes a soft gray paper, and nobody trusts it. And because the men who can buy a good mill do not want to make paper. They want to lend money to the Sultan."

"That is a fair summary of the whole Empire," said Mehmet dryly.

On the way home, Ayaan walked a pace behind his father, and for a long time he said nothing.

There is a difference, he thought, between a gap in the market and a gap I can fill.

Paper was a gap, but a mill needed a river, a skilled man, and a great deal of money.

A man who sold paper and pens to the clerks of a city that could not make its own needed only a counter, honest weights, and patience.

He filed the thought gently, in the place where he kept things that would take five years to ripen.

IV

Constantinople, Tophane — 2 May 1896

In the afternoon, Mustafa Efendi’s chain-hoist broke, and the whole warehouse ground to a halt.

"Tophane," Mustafa said grimly, and took the children with him, because there was nobody to leave them with and because, as he said, a child who sees a good workshop will never forget it.

The Tophane quarter was a different city again. The great Imperial Cannon Foundry rose above it, black with a hundred years of smoke, and the streets below it rang with hammers.

Down a lane too narrow for a cart, behind a door with no sign, was a workshop barely larger than Mehmet’s shop. The air inside was thick with oil and hot iron, and the light came from a single high window.

At the back stood a lathe.

It was a big, ugly, beautiful thing, painted green once and rubbed to gray where hands had worked it, with a brass plate on the bed that read Birmingham. Beside it, wiping his palms on a rag, stood a lean, gray-mustached man in a leather apron.

"Usta Hovsep," said Mustafa warmly. "I have brought you a pulley wheel that has decided to die."

The machinist took the broken piece in both hands. He turned it over, sniffed it, squinted along the groove with one eye shut, and said something rude in Armenian under his breath.

"Cast badly. Whoever made this poured the iron too cold, and it has a hairline flaw inside." He looked up at Mustafa. "Two days. I will turn you a new one, and it will outlive your grandchildren."

"What do you charge?"

"What it is worth."

He said it with the quiet pride of a man who had never needed to say anything else.

While the two men argued amiably over the price, Ayaan drifted toward the lathe and stopped a respectful distance from it.

He watched the machinist’s apprentice set a bar of iron in the chuck and bring the tool post in. The cutting edge touched the metal, and a long bright curl of shaving unspooled and fell, and the bar began to take a shape.

It was nothing like a factory.

It was one lathe, in one room, run by one master and two boys, and everything it made was made by the eye and the hand and the stubborn experience of a single man.

"Can you make them all the same?" Ayaan asked.

The old man looked down, a little startled. "The same?"

"Ten wheels. Are they all exactly alike?"

Hovsep’s gray mustache moved in a smile. "I can make you a wheel to the width of a hair, little one. I can make you ten, and each will be a hair different from the last, because I am a man and not Allah."

He tapped the lathe’s bed with a knuckle.

"And the steel comes from Sheffield, and the files from Solingen, and the good oil from Marseille. If the ships stop, I stop."

It was the whole problem, laid out in one sentence by a man who did not know he was describing it.

Ayaan knew how a rifle’s bolt locked, and how smokeless powder burned, and the gearing of a dynamo.

None of it could be made in this room.

It needed a machine to make the machine, a metallurgist, a chemist, a testing ground, a bank to pay for it all, and an officer who would risk his career on a child’s idea.

Knowing a thing was not the same as making it, and he had never felt that in his bones until now.

I would need a hundred Hovseps, he thought. And a hundred more to teach them.

And one of the hundred, he realized, stood a few streets from the bank he could not stop being afraid for.

He thought of the lathe, and of the date, and he did not like where those two thoughts met.

He bent and picked up the iron shaving, still warm, and put it in his pocket.

V

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 16 May 1896

They made the map in the hayloft, on the back of a sheet of packing paper that Zeynep had stolen from her father’s warehouse and flattened under a crate for a week.

It began as a game.

Zeynep had demanded to know why Ayaan had stopped answering her questions in the bazaar and started staring at things instead, and he had told her the truth, or a piece of it, which was the only kind of truth he had to give.

"I am making a list," he had said, "of what the city could use."

"What kind of list?"

"Things I can see in my head. Some of them are easy. Some of them are very far away."

She had not asked how he could see them. She had looked at him for a long time, the way she had looked at Cemal, and then she had fetched a stick of charcoal.

Now the paper lay between them on the boards, divided in two by a thick black line.

"This side is this year," said Zeynep, tapping it. "And this side is one day. The things that go on the second side, you have to tell me why."

She wrote carefully in block letters, and her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth.

Under this year went the easy things, the ones he had seen with his own eyes.

Paper, pens, and ink, sold honestly to the clerks and printers.

A book of who pays and who does not, for the lane.

Sealed packets of rice and chickpeas, weighed once, stamped with Baba’s seal.

That last one was Zeynep’s, and he would have kissed her for it.

"If the weight is already in the bag," she explained, "the ship’s cook does not have to watch the scale. And if it is wrong, he knows whose seal to bring back."

It was trust made visible, a coin you could carry in a sack.

A man who stamped his name on his own weights was no longer asking the buyer to believe him, and was handing him the means to prove him wrong.

Nobody in the lane was doing it, because nobody in the lane could afford to be wrong in public.

His father could.

"That goes first," Ayaan said. "Not today. But it is the first thing we do when we are allowed to do anything."

Zeynep underlined it twice, with a small fierce smile.

Then she looked at the other side of the line.

Under one day he had written, in the smallest letters he could manage, a short column of marks that only he could read.

Carriage with no horse. Light from wire. Speech along a thread. Boats under the water. Machine that flies.

"Those are fairy stories," said Zeynep.

"Some of them are already real, in Paris and in America."

She sat back on her heels. "Then why are they not here?"

"That is the question."

He took the charcoal and drew a short vertical line from the bottom of the paper up to the top, and across it three small bars like the rungs of a ladder.

"A thing needs three things to reach us. Someone who can make it. Someone who can pay for it. And someone who will believe it is safe to use."

"Maker, payer, believer," said Zeynep slowly.

She said it twice more, as she did when she was putting something away.

"That is the same as the lane," she said at last. "A man who makes good rice, a man who buys it, and a neighbor who says it is good."

"It is the same."

"So it is not the idea that is difficult. It is finding all three at once."

He stared at her.

It was so plainly true that he felt a small, odd pang.

She is six, he thought, and she has said in one sentence what a shelf of development economics could not.

"There is another kind," she added, because she had found a new thread and could not leave it alone. "Last week my father read a Paris newspaper at supper. There was a doctor who made a light that goes through a hand, and you can see the bones inside. Is that on your list?"

"The rays."

He had known of it, of course. The German professor’s discovery had been in every paper since the winter, and in the history he remembered it would have a name in every language by the end of the year.

"That is not a dream," he said. "It is real, and it is in Würzburg, and nobody in this city has the machine."

"So it goes in the middle."

She drew a third column between the other two, quickly, with a firm hand.

"Things that exist, but cannot reach us."

"Yes."

"And that column is the one that has to be fixed first."

"Why first?"

"Because the first column, you can do with your own hands." Zeynep’s eyes were bright and entirely serious. "The last column, you have to wait for the world. But the middle one is only a road that has not been built."

Ayaan sat very still with the charcoal in his fingers and the hayloft dust turning in a bar of light.

"What are you going to do with it?" said Zeynep. "The map."

"Nothing, yet."

"That is a stupid answer."

"I know." He was smiling. "But I do not know how to make a road, and I would like to learn before I start paving."

She rolled the paper carefully and handed it to him, and he found that his hands were not quite steady.

"Hide it," she said. "I will not tell."

VI

Constantinople, Emin?nü — 30 May 1896

By the end of May, the chart over his cot had acquired a second life.

The French harbor was the same, and so were the soundings and the little anchors. But in the faint spaces of the city between the docks, in a hand so small it could pass for a flaw in the paper, Ayaan had begun to scratch the beginnings of a different map.

A dot by the Spice Bazaar, for the rice sellers who would want sealed packets.

A cross at Bab?ali, for a printer who hated Trieste.

A circle in Tophane, around a lane with no name.

And another mark, on the heights of Galata, that he had made once and then rubbed at with his thumb until the paper had gone thin and gray.

He was staring at it on a warm evening, with the shutters open and the smell of the water coming up the lane, when the floorboards creaked behind him.

Fatma stood in the doorway with a folded cloth in her hands.

She did not come in at once. She looked at the chart and the marks on it, and he watched her read them as she read everything, quickly and quietly and entirely.

She set the folded cloth on the end of the cot. It was a new shirt, the first he had ever owned that had not been cut from one of his father’s.

She sat down beside him and let her eyes travel over the paper.

They paused on the heavy mark above Galata.

"That one is rubbed very thin," she said.

"I made it too dark."

"Did you."

She did not say anything else for a time. "When I was a girl," Fatma said at last, "my father kept a chart like this in the galley of his steamer. He used to put a mark on every place where a storm had caught him, so that he would remember to go carefully."

"Did it help?"

"I think it helped him to be afraid in the right places."

She put one hand over his, on the edge of the cot.

"You do not have to tell me what the mark means. But whatever you are carrying, my little lion, you are allowed to carry it more gently than that."

He swallowed.

He wanted to tell her. He wanted it so badly that his chest ached, to say that he knew what would happen in August, and that he had watched the date come closer for six weeks and had not found a single door in the world that he could open.

"Anne," he said instead. "If a man knows that something bad is going to happen, and he is only six, and no one will ever listen to him..."

"Then he should grow up as fast as he honestly can," said Fatma, without a pause. "And in the meantime, he should be very kind to the people near him, because those are the only ones he is certain of."

She kissed the top of his head and rose.

At the door she turned back, and the last of the evening light caught the side of her face.

"Your father says he expected to teach a clever boy, and is beginning to think he is only the first of your teachers."

She went out, and the house grew quiet.

Ayaan lay back and looked at the map he had made.

He had a harbor, a list, and a ladder with three rungs.

He had a printer who hated Trieste, a machinist who could turn a wheel to a hair, and a mother who had just taught him how to carry what he could not put down.

He did not yet have a road.

But he could see, for the first time, where the first stone would go.

Sealed packets, stamped with his father’s name. Paper and ink for the clerks of a city that could not make its own.

A small beginning, he thought. But a true one.

And somewhere above Galata, in the faint gray scar of a thumb on old French paper, the summer was already counting down.